Query for books about class

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at tsoft.com
Fri Jan 5 00:01:33 PST 2001


Somebody mentioned ``The Uses of Literacy'' and had forgotten the author. It's by Richard Hoggart. I read several of his works on the suggestion of Michael Corbin from the old Bad list. Here are the references from the UCB Melvyl catalogue:

Hoggart, Richard, 1918-. The uses of literacy /, Richard Hoggart; with a new introduction by Andrew Goodwin. New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A. : Transaction Publishers, c1992. xliii, 305 p. ; 23 cm. Series title: Classics in communication and mass culture series.

Hoggart, Richard, 1918-. On culture and communication. New York, Oxford University Press, 1972 [c1971] 111 p. 23 cm. Series title: The B.B.C. Reith lectures, 1971, The Reith lectures ; 1971.

Hoggart sets up the idea that literacy in the context of working class life has essentially no liberatory effect at all. Instead, the uses of literacy perform a transformation process whereby the former working class or proletariat are turned as a whole into the mechanism of consumption for mass media: from coal mines and blacking shops to shopping malls and trash media in one easy step--which constitutes what passes for literacy, and indeed what is taught as literacy in public education.

It's an old work set in the forties and fifties and most of its examples are extremely dated. But the basic idea is a devastating critique of the dream that education will make you free. Education in this logic becomes one of the primary mechanisms of oppression.

With a little bit of work you could make the same arguement for all the computer media and theoretical promise of the internet. Although Lessig takes a different track, a more abstract version of Hoggart's argument could be combined with Lessig and Mike Perelman's views of the Information Economy to yeild a nice continuity between the eras of the printed word and the cyber word---as two ages of modern class warefare.

Chuck Grimes



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